Best Free Stuff Online

Long before the dawn of the Web, Usenet connected people of like minds and interests in its electronic version of a 19th-century salon. Now Google Groups gives you search engine-style access to over 700 million messages posted to Usenet groups during the past 20 years. It's a fascinating compendium of information on everything from the Challenger explosion to Microsoft's legal woes. Google has even culled historical gems from the archive with special links; an example is Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of what later became the World Wide Web. And this isn't just the cyber equivalent of a time capsule. You'll find up-to-the-minute chatter and advice on every topic under the sun--and you can post your own messages.

Tired of having your system bog down for half an hour while you download a file that was supposed to take only minutes? Before you hit the Download Now button, stop by the Calculators On-Line Center's File Download Time Calculator and enter the size of the file you want to snag. The calculator will quickly estimate the amount of time the download should actually take, based on its size and the speed of your Net connection (56-kbps modem, DSL, or whatever). While you're at it, check out some of the more than 14,000 other specialized calculators listed here, such as one for measuring focal depth and exposure times for different photography conditions. Another intriguing offering is a Java applet that calculates how far from a traffic light you need to hit your brakes to stop on time. (The calculation is based on car speed and brake-delay time--no mention of cell phones in the equation.)

Looking simultaneously at several sites--say, at the home pages of four online newspapers--usually means having to toggle back and forth between multiple windows. But Quickbrowse cleans up window clutter by pasting up to six pages that you specify into one, long window for easy scrolling (for $13 every three months, you can obtain additional pages and receive a daily e-mail of your sites). You can specify a list that contains the URLs you want, or simply choose from ready-made lists for themes such as tech news or comic strips. The Quickbrowse site also offers QbSearch, a metasearch engine that employs the same clever principle: Enter search terms, and you can get results from up to 17 different engines and directories, stitched into a single page. (It's a handy way to search multiple sites with one click, even though Google is conspicuously absent from the source list.) Use the Quickbrowse This button to choose links from the search results and have all the pages open in a single window.

Take Madison Avenue to the cleaners with WebWasher, a utility for eliminating bandwidth-hogging online ads. This 1.2MB program also blocks cookies and Web bugs that let companies monitor your online wanderings. (You can specify which cookies you want to block, allowing only those that ease your Web movements.) Most important, without all those annoying pop-up and jumbo-size ads, your surfing will go smoother and faster. (Note: PCWorld.com uses pop-up ads.)

You downloaded a fantastic free utility, and now your screen is rife with pop-up ads. Could the program be spyware? Spychecker will help you find out. Spyware is ad-supported software that deposits a tracking tool on your hard drive to send data about you and your surfing habits to advertisers. Not all ad-supported software is spyware, and most ad companies say the data they collect isn't matched to your identity. But Spychecker lets you decide what to tolerate. At Spychecker's site, type in the name of the freeware app you're considering, and Spychecker will tell you whether that program is a known spy. The site also supplies the name of the advertiser behind the spyware, as well as a link to the company's privacy policy. To see whether your PC is already infected with spyware, use Ad-Aware, a free 833KB utility that detects and eliminates the most commonly used spyware.

You'll feel smarter just adding this erudite site to your Favorites list. A brilliant collection of ideas on subjects from Laurel and Hardy to Freud and Jung, Arts & Letters Daily mimics a 19th-century broadsheet, and is jam-packed with fascinating articles culled daily from publications around the world. Witty teasers like this one pull you into the stories: a wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women (for an article on animal husbandry). There are also links to 19 newspapers from around the globe, 74 journals and magazines, radio stations, and columnists--from the prickly Molly Ivins to the patrician George Will. Make it your home page and you'll never lack for interesting party talk.

Hell hath no fury like a British cyclist scorned. It all began when the stuffy owners of an iron fence in London posted a sign warning commuters not to lock their bikes to the fence. So the outraged author of What Should I Put on the Fence? has been locking everything but his bike to the fence ever since: a tricycle (not technically a bicycle), an ironing board, even a pot of tea (for the haggard handyman who has to trim away the items daily with a hacksaw). This kind of quirky, personality-driven site is what helped make the Web popular in the first place. See the photos and read the author's engaging narrative ("Wife worries about fence obsession") documenting the Keystone KopsA-like shenanigans; then nominate your own offering to the fence gods.

Many free e-book sites promise a lot of titles but then deliver only obscure material you'd never want to read. But MemoWare has over 10,000 PDA documents for reading on Palm, Pocket PC, and other handheld computers. And the quality is as impressive as the quantity. Among the wealth of offerings are literature (classic and contemporary novels, children's stories, and mysteries), business, philosophy, and religious titles. In addition, you'll find files that are useful for everyday tasks, such as ones containing worldwide airport codes and airline 800 numbers, medical information from the National Institutes of Health, dictionaries in various languages, sporting event schedules, area codes for the United States, and the IRS's list of per diem rates allowable for business travelers in various cities and countries. The offerings go on and on. There's even a file containing an episode guide to three seasons of The Sopranos. Now that's useful.